Around five million so-called ghost patients are weighing on the finances of the National Health Service in England, according to figures highlighted by GB News. These are people who remain registered with a GP practice even though they should no longer be on its list, and collectively they are said to cost the NHS hundreds of millions of pounds each year.
The scale of the gap is striking. According to the latest figures, 63.4 million patients are registered with GP practices in England, even though the population of the country is only about 58.6 million. That leaves a discrepancy of roughly five million more registrations than there are people, the heart of the ghost patient problem.
The cost flows from how practices are funded. Because GP practices receive money for each patient on their list, the registrations that no longer correspond to real, present patients still draw funding, amounting to about 650 million pounds a year tied to people who, in effect, are not there to be cared for.
Part of the difficulty is technological. Critics point to a history of costly failures in NHS computer systems, including one well-known project that cost billions of pounds before it was abandoned, and they note that the underlying databases often do not talk to each other, making it hard to keep patient lists accurate.
The government is now trying to address the mess by introducing a single patient record intended to pull information together across the system. Even so, there is considerable skepticism about whether the effort will succeed if the separate databases beneath it remain unable to communicate properly.
Ministers have also brought in a new rule under which patients who do not respond to a request to confirm their registration within three months are removed from the GP list. The aim is to clear out registrations that no longer reflect real patients and to stop money being spent on people who are not using the service.
The British Medical Association has pushed back hard. The doctors organization says many practices have removed genuine patients in error and then been forced to put them back on their lists, and it argues that three months is not long enough for older or more vulnerable people who may be away. The BMA says it is writing to the government, even as it agrees that money should be spent on caring for real patients rather than wasted on those who do not exist.